CHAPTER THREE

The best exercise that two people can practice for awareness and to
understand sparring is push hands. I have covered the main areas of
this exercise in my second book, “POWER T’AI CHI CH’UAN
BOOK TWO” so I will not cover it here. I will say though that push
hands should be learnt for the sake of learning a martial art and not
for the sake of doing push hands. The real way of push hands is quite
different to what many people think it is. The whole idea of push
hands has to do with balance, weighting and power. One shouldn’t
have the idea of ‘I can push you but you can’t push me.’ So what!
We learn push hands to know about a ‘method of fighting’.
I will cover in this book an advanced method and probably the best
method of leading a student into sparring called ‘T’ai Chi Sticking
Hands.’ Along with the pa kua method of sticking hands we have an
unsurpassed way of learning about sparring.
Sticking hands teaches us about close in fighting and that’s where it
really counts, we don’t fight someone from 10 feet away. You are
being attacked from only inches away and you must block the attack
and immediately re-attack until it becomes as close to reflex action
as possible. Once again the main thing is not to allow this to become
a brawl, this way no one learns. We must use great control and try to
become super sensitive. Even if it means that we are defeated many
times to gain this sensitivity it will be worth it in the end. I will add
here that this type of sticking hands has nothing to do with the
Wing-Chun version.